Traditional fixtures for testing a plurality of electronic circuit modules include ‘card cage’ structures, in which units (e.g., circuit boards) under test are ‘plugged’ into a backplane, and ‘bed of nails’ methods that connect probe points of the test fixture with the tested components. While such test fixtures may be satisfactory for relatively small components, they cannot be used for relatively large ‘box-configured’ devices, such as stand-alone communication modules containing one or more circuit boards housed within a common enclosure that is intended to be used as a tabletop or shelf-supported product.
Previous industry-accepted methods for performing test-connectivity for such box products include: placing the products side-by-side or stacked one on top of the other on a workbench, shelf, or conveyor; placing each product within its own fixtured carrier tray or pallet; and testing one box product at a time. Each of these approaches has inherent drawbacks. The first method requires an inordinate amount of floor space, and leaves the product vulnerable to cosmetic damage; the second scheme is expensive to fabricate and service, as each unit under test (UUT) requires its own fixtured pallet; the third approach increases the total test time (and therefore the total cost of test), since it cannot take advantage of testing multiple UUTs in parallel.